This feminist biography of one of the greatest English novelists sheds important new light on George Eliot's audacious life and powerful works, including such master-pieces as Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss. In her own lifetime, Eliot was widely condemned as a fallen woman: she dared to live openly with a man she could never marry, and shortly after his death married a man twenty years her junior. Her defiance of the conventions that ruled most Victorian women's lives did not prevent her achieving both great professional success and personal happiness. Why, then, did she deny so many of her gifted, headstrong heroines the same opportunities?